The art of an enduring love

R.B. Kitaj lives in Westwood, in a house surrounded by white roses. He receives visitors only after 4 p.m., and when he opens the door promptly on the hour, the painter inspires the mild trepidation associated with a job interview.

Kitaj appears aloof, even haughty. He isn’t. But his increasing deafness doesn’t invite questions, and his white beard and stern features give him the appearance of a Bergman patriarch.

Kitaj, 70, has embarked on a fruitful new phase of his art, despite a life that has been shadowed by sadness for nearly a decade. A show of his paintings and drawings at the L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice, on display until July 5, features colorful and surprisingly candid images that speak of an enduring attachment.

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30 years of memories

On this afternoon, Kitaj leads a visitor through his house on a tour as carefully constructed as his paintings. It’s a choreographed narrative with an arc that corresponds to the movement through the house -- a story that encompasses meeting his late wife, Sandra Fisher; waging the so-called Tate war, Kitaj’s battle with the British art critics; studying Judaism; and finally, finding a new subject.

For Kitaj, everything blends together: art, history and autobiography. As critic Jed Perl puts it, he “is an artist who lives in his own imagination, which is where an artist ought to live.”

Kitaj moves to the sunken drawing room, a shrine to his family, especially Fisher, who died in 1994. Drawings, paintings and photographs of her decorate the walls or stand stacked on the floor.

The two met in 1970 at the Los Angeles printmaking studio Gemini GEL, where she worked as an assistant to master printer Kenneth Tyler. A few years later, they met again in England, where the Ohio-born Kitaj was living. Soon afterward, they were married.

“She was the most beautiful woman in London,” he says.

A Kitaj painting shows their wedding in a London synagogue. In the celebratory picture, best man David Hockney and guests including painters Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach are all under the chuppah, the traditional Jewish wedding canopy.

Kitaj points to another picture of Fisher. “We painted each other nude, you know.”

Standing against a stack of paintings on the floor is a small, delicate drawing of Fisher asleep, strands of hair coming loose from her chignon. The tranquil picture is a charcoal love letter.

“When she died, London also died for me.”

A few of Fisher’s paintings -- small landscapes -- decorate the wall. On the mantelpiece, the photograph of Fisher that since her death has been reprinted in every Kitaj exhibition catalog is propped against the Golden Lion he was awarded at the 1995 Venice Biennale.

“Love and hate,” he says. “I had a war at the Tate Gallery and then, one year later, another group of critics awarded me the top painting prize.”

Kitaj is referring to the “Tate war,” the controversy involving a show of his paintings in 1994 when the museum (now Tate Britain) mounted a retrospective of his work that would travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan in New York. When it opened in London, the British critics hated the show. They gave Kitaj “a drubbing,” critic Robert Hughes wrote, “such as few artists ever have to endure in a lifetime.”

“A supreme dilettante,” was the Guardian’s opinion. “Poor, private, pensive Ronald B. Kitaj,” alliterated the Sunday Times. “The wandering Jew, the T.S. Eliot of painting?” wrote the Independent. “Kitaj turns out, instead, to be the Wizard of Oz: a small man with a megaphone held to his lips.”

The painter did what few painters do: He answered back, charging the critics with anti-Semitism.

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‘Feelings of jealousy’

Kitaj’s search for “a Jewish art” and publicly talking about his paintings were “very strange to the English art world,” says Perl, himself an acerbic writer. “Most of what went on around the show had not so much to do with what was in the show but feelings that the critics had -- feelings of jealousy that he could both paint and speak about the paintings.”

At the height of the controversy, Fisher, 47, died of a brain aneurysm. Kitaj claimed her death was related to stress caused by the critics’ attacks. In a furious painting, he portrayed the critics as a single, multi-eyed monster being executed by a firing squad composed of Kitaj and Edouard Manet. Eventually, he left London, his home of four decades, and came to L.A., which over the years had become a second home.

“I kept coming back,” Kitaj says. “My mother died here. My father died here. My oldest kids [with his first wife] moved here. My three grandsons were born here. And, above all, I met Sandra here.”

So he decided to “live happily ever after, among six Kitaj boys in Westwood.” This is his Aix-en-Provence, he says.

He has told the story before, and the account doesn’t change much from one occasion to the next. Indeed, his essay for the Louver exhibition catalog contains some of the exact wording. But the story -- like any that one bothers to tell many times -- still moves him. He points to a Lee Friedlander photo of his son Max, wearing a British school uniform and eating a jelly sandwich in the kitchen.

“That’s the saddest picture I’ve ever seen in my life,” he says. “That’s a day or two after his mother died. And it proves something about 20th century visual art -- the apotheosis of that was Clement Greenberg’s ‘Nothing counts except what’s in the picture.’ But once you know his mother just died, it changes your whole view -- and that’s not in the picture, you see. A lot of my work is about that.”

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Religious obsession

One room in the Westwood house is devoted to books about his painter hero, Paul Cezanne. Next door is a library stuffed floor to ceiling with volumes on Judaism.

“This is a special room for me,” Kitaj says. “My obsession with the Jewish question is the great drama of my life and art, and it feeds into the studio.”

He talks of reading Hannah Arendt’s New Yorker articles about the Adolf Eichmann trial in the early ‘60s.

“My mind started to tick over. I had no Jewish background; my mother was an atheist until the day she died. I had no religious training, I had no cultural background, and I decided to educate myself,” he says. “That’s what started it for me ... and so I spent the rest of my life reading whatever I could to educate myself, and I’ve become a kind of mad, obsessed expert on the subject.”

“There’s an organized web of obsessions in Kitaj’s thinking,” says his friend Paul Holdengraber, director of the LACMA Institute for Art & Cultures, “a gravitational force toward this very question of identity.”

Holdengraber remembers his first conversation with Kitaj, which took place in the library and covered such subjects as diaspora and exile, Walter Benjamin, Jewish mysticism and Rainer Maria Rilke. It lasted three hours, “at the end of which, he asked me if I wanted something to drink.”

After a ritual stop in the kitchen for a glass of cranberry juice, Kitaj moves to the garden, where a swimming pool shimmers turquoise beside his studio, painted the chrome yellow of Van Gogh’s house in Arles.

Inside, several easels support paintings of Fisher and Kitaj. In the pictures, he has aged but she hasn’t. The paintings are erotic, intimate, one partly inspired by a John Singer Sargent portrait of an Egyptian girl -- in Kitaj’s estimation, “the sexiest painting in art history.”

As Kitaj was working on these paintings, Hockney stopped by. “I see you have found your subject,” he remarked.

It was the love story of Kitaj and Fisher.

Painting her, “it’s like a romance,” he says. “I fondle her with my paintbrush. I can feel her body in a strange way.”

Kitaj pauses and looks at the paintings. “I never dreamed I would find this great subject out here,” he says. “I have her back in my life.”

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‘R.B. Kitaj: Los Angeles Pictures’

Where: L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice

When: Tuesdays-Saturdays,

10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Ends: July 5

Contact: (310) 822-4955